Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Ditto for StackOverflow itself? I just can't understand why so often a really valuable topic that collects insightful answers gets closed up because of not fitting some template.

Also, I don't get the idea of "protected questions" - the ones marked by:

     "This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site."

What does this even mean? Is the assumption that a new user will always say "thanks!" / "me too", while older user won't, in any way correct? Do statistics suggest something like that? It always struck me as offensive to new users.

As a stack overflow old-timer, I can tell you that questions that get a lot of hits from outside, (e.g. popular searches, blog post links) tend to get more visitors that are not familiar with how the site works. Many of them assume it's like a discussion board and post "answers" thanking another poster or asking a different question. I've seen this many times. It's not really offensive to claim that people new to the site are likely to be less familiar with how its intended to work.

Probably based on experience, it wasn't like that initially if I remember correctly.

Most of the time protection kicks in _because_ the question has received many "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. Indeed, the third deleted answer on any question automatically triggers protection.

Thanks! Me too! :)

recursive, marcusf, bp_: thanks for clearing that out for me.

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